At the moment, the world is watching in horror as Israel is conducting the latest stage in its seemingly endless and relentless campaign of extermination aimed at the population of the Gaza strip.

That little piece of land (counting a grand total of 360 km² or a
landmass smaller than the tiny Isle of Man possessing a whopping
572 km²) has been turned into an "open air prison" for
1.657 million Palestinians unable to leave or hide. The majority
of the mainstream media across the globe, in contrast, appears
willfully unaware of the actual circumstances on the ground and
publicly supports Israel's "right to defend itself".

Originally, the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan assigned Gaza
to the Arab Palestinian state, but in the course of the 1948
Arab-Israeli War Egypt occupied Gaza City and on 22 September
1948 the Arab League (with the exception of Jordan) recognized
the All-Palestine Government set up in the Egyptian-controlled
Gaza Strip. As a result, Arab states were then in a position to
wash their hands of any kind of responsibility or involvement and
abandoned the Palestinians to face the Israelis on their own.
Even though since then many things have changed and many
Arab-Israeli battles have been fought, most notably the 1967 war
that changed everything, and also brought the Americans into the
fray, today Arab nations persist in this lackadaisical attitude
of leaving the Palestinians to their own devices.

As such, even the Jerusalem Post's Ariel Ben Solomon remarked
upon this surprisingly unsurprising fact, declaring that
"Arab newspapers are still giving top coverage to the
conflict [in Gaza], but it is not appearing to be dominating the
news", as if the World Cup in Brazil (which came to an end
last Sunday) were a matter of greater interest. Solomon even
disclosed that the "Jordanian Ad-Doustour newspaper, wrote
that it is completely clear that many of the countries in the
region are waiting for this round of fighting to stop in order to
resume their usual issues as though nothing happened.”
The picture that thus emerges shows us that only the Shi'ite
state of Iran is now effectively lending the Palestinians a
helping hand, Mohammadi Araqi the Deputy Head of the Iranian Red
Crescent Society, declaring that the "Iranian Red Crescent
Society is prepared to help the Palestinians through sending
medical and welfare aid".

At the same time, Turkey, another non-Arab yet a staunchly Sunni
nation in the region, has announced that it will send foodstuffs
and other urgent aid material worth $1 million in support of the
Palestinians in Gaza. Turkey's Prime Minister, the incredibly
popular yet equally divisive Recep Tayyip Erdogan personally gave
the orders to Turkey's Cooperation and Coordination Office. Ever
since his "One Minute" stunt at Davos in 2009, Erdogan
very much likes to portray himself as Palestine's best and only
friend in the region. It therefore should come as no surprise
that the internet was abuzz with news that Khaled Meshal had
secretly visited Ankara at the beginning of this month to secure
Turkish support against an Israeli attack. These rumors have
since been denied, but that Erdogan's AKP is sympathetic to
Hamas, as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a well-known
fact.

In this context, the Washington-based foundation for Defense of
Democracies released a report on Terrorism Finance in Turkey a
few months ago, even appending the ominous subtitle A Growing
Concern. Its author Jonathan Schanzer, a prolific scholar in
Middle Eastern studies, does not mince his words, accusing Turkey
of trying to "integrate Hamas ... into what appeared to be
the new regional order" – a design that went bankrupt after
the fall of Mohammad Morsi in Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's
"coup-that-wasn't-a-coup" last summer.

Even though Schanzer's case appears flimsy at best, the report
nevertheless concludes that Turkey's AKP government is a major
source of income for the Palestinian resistance movement (the
acronym Hamas stands for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah or
'Islamic Resistance Movement'), which is all but a
statement of fact. A fact that really does not constitute any
great concern as Hamas is not designated as a terrorist
organization by either the UN or Turkey. Hamas is after all a
multi-layered organization, comprising three separate wings: one
responsible for social welfare, another for political action, and
finally also a specifically military section, the Izz ad-Din
al-Qassam Brigades, formed in 1992 and arguably responsible for
Hamas' terrorist label in the US (granted by the overly hawkish
Madeleine Albright's State Department in 1997, "in accordance
with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act
(INA))".

Even though Hamas is now part of the Palestinian unity
government, abiding by the conditions stipulated by the EU and
the US, Israel persists in vilifying the organization as a
terrorist network bent on the destruction of Israel. In spite of
the fact that the current Israeli onslaught came in response to
the killing of three hapless Jewish teenagers, the official
rhetoric as well as the mainstream media's focus has now turned
to the rockets launched from Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu and various
members of his government refer to these "primitive rocket
attacks", using the ever-outspoken Norman Finkelstein's
words, as providing the real reason for Israel's asymmetrical
offensive on multiple targets in the Gaza strip: Israeli missiles
do hit civilian targets, killing and wounding numerous
Palestinians in the process: while rockets from Gaza either get
intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome (an "effective, truck-towed
mobile air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defence
Systems") or merely land on empty plots of land, killing and
wounding no-one as a result. In other words, the legitimate
self-defense argument seems more than spurious, as the Iron Dome
system appears more than well-suited to emasculate Palestinian
projectiles.

Lately some voices have emerged indicating that the recently
discovered hydrocarbon reserves off the Gaza coast constitute a
better explanation for Bibi's currently inflamed belligerence. As
worded
by ever-eloquent Pepe Escobar, this is what constitutes the
"[b]igger [and largely unseen] [p]icture - the 122 trillion
cubic feet of gas plus the potential 1.6 billion barrels of oil
in the Levant Basin spread over the territorial waters of Israel,
Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus and – of course – Gaza". After all,
as I wrote earlier it has always been about the oil, quoting
Professor Michael Schwartz paraphrasing Bill Clinton's speech-writer James Carville.

Last year, this discovery led to a renewed commercial entente
between Israel and Turkey, allowing the Turkish conglomerate
Zorlu Energy to seek a "15-year contract for 3 billion cubic
meters of natural gas annually as part of a hoped-for $2.5
billion pipeline project running underwater from the Leviathan
field to Turkey". And this much-vaunted "Leviathan field
[is] located approximately 80 miles off the coast of Israel and
situated in water that is more than 5,000 feet deep — which holds
18 Tcf [or Trillion Cubic Feet] in estimated recoverable
resources,” as noted by the US Energy Information
Administration (EIA).

With regard to the current Israeli operation, significantly
having received the name Operation Protective Edge, there are the
Marine-1 and Marine-2 gas wells, inside the Leviathan field and
off the Gaza coast. The Geneva-based Anais Antreasyan rightly
points out in the University of California's Journal of Palestine
Studies that Israel's long-term goal is "to integrate the gas
fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore
installations". But, as the international security
journalist and academic Dr. Nafeez Ahmed appropriately
underlines, the "Israel-Palestine conflict is clearly not all
about resources. But in an age of expensive energy, competition
to dominate regional fossil fuels is increasingly influencing the
critical decisions that can inflame war". So that, on
Tuesday, 15 July, Bibi signaled his willingness to accept an
Egypt-proposed cease-fire aimed at ending the week-long deadly
onslaught. The Israeli Security Cabinet even accepted the offer,
which was immediately rejected by Hamas.

Through the efforts of the Zorlu Energy conglomerate Turkey is
also somewhat privy to this partial energy war, as would befit a
wily pseudo-Ottoman trader always trying to maximize profits
while weighing the risks. Last April, for instance, Zorlu even
acquired a 25% stake in an 840 MW capacity combined cycle power
station based on natural gas in Ashkelon - "Israel’s largest
private power plant" built by the Israeli firm Dorad Energy
Ltd. As reported by Sharon Udasin, the "company will be
selling all of its power output directly to private companies and
government agencies, such as the Defense Ministry, Mekorot,
Israel Aerospace Industries, Fattal Hotels, Keter Plastics,
Isrotel, Strauss, Osem, Tamares Hotels, the Cargal Group, Seven
Stars Mall, Bank Leumi and Tnuva".

The wily Turks are not just dealing with Israel for energy and
profits, its immediate neighbors Iraq, the KRG and Syria are also
within its pseudo-Ottoman reach. As reported by Hurriyet Daily
News' Sevil Erkus from Ankara, "KRG President Masoud Barzani
was in Ankara [on Monday, 14 July] for talks with Turkish
President Abdullah Gul, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, amid the ongoing regional
crisis due to growing jihadist activity. Barzani was also
motivated to find a formula to receive revenues from the sale of
northern Iraqi oil".

Now that the Islamic State (or the terrorist organization
formerly known as ISIS) has succeeded in dividing the lands of
Mesopotamia, known as Iraq since the end of World War I (1918),
after having secured the end of Syria's lucrative oil trade that
secured the flow of some 400,000 barrels per day previously
providing Bashar al-Assad with a major source of income, regional
players are once again focusing on the land that "swims on a sea
of oil". And the KRG, as the temporary winner in the armed
contest with the Islamic State, is now capitalizing by means of
profitable deals with its northern neighbor of Turkey and its
somewhat long-standing yet fairly removed ally of Israel. In this
way, the Kurds, the Turks, and the Israelis seem intimately
interlinked through their network of energy sales and profits,
leaving the hapless Palestinians out in the cold and subject to
veritable apartheid treatment and a rain of IDF bombs.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.